When Words Become Actions Become Protocols, Doctor Who: The Pilot, Reviews, 16/04/2017

When Steven Moffat was establishing himself as a television writer and producer, he did so in the world of sitcoms. Moffat by default writes farce stories. We throw the term ‘farce’ around to describe any old horrible, ironically comical mess we stumble into.

Bill and Heather are actually the most important relationship in this
episode. It's the best example in Moffat's entire tenure, I think, of
his genuinely progressive perspective. He always tries to learn
from his fans, even his fiercest critics. And it feels good for young
queer women to see characters like them in their favourite shows,
and for concerns like theirs to be the pivotal points of their stories.

But the term has a precise technical meaning in the science of writing. A farce is a narrative based around a miscommunication – different people who are all interacting in a reasonably simple situation have, somewhere early on, misunderstood each other.

A very ordinary thing, slightly misunderstanding what someone else says. We do it all the time. Normally, we know we’re confused and ask for clarification, but sometimes we proceed thinking we know exactly what to do. In most of our lives, it turns out not to be important and everything goes fine anyway.

But when this happens on a sitcom, what’s misunderstood is some critical piece of information that throws everyone’s plans and lives into a total mess. We laugh because of the embarrassment (or failure to be so when you really, really should) of the characters.

Just think of the most intense (and ridiculous) example I can find at short notice in Moffat’s career. “The Girl With Two Breasts” from his biggest hit sitcom Coupling.

Jeff, the socially awkward Kramer of the group, starts up a great conversation with a beautiful woman who think’s he’s very attractive. But they share no common language. So, while they believe they understand what they’re saying to each other, they totally misinterpret everything the other is saying.

Watching someone else dig their own hole is a classic farce
scenario, but a big part of why we laugh is rooted in how horrible
it would be if such a terrible misunderstanding were to happen to
us in real life.

The most juvenile detail being that Jeff thinks her name is the Hebrew word for ‘breasts.’
• • •
The farce narrative is a default for Moffat, having shaped many of his storylines in Doctor Who around misunderstandings over a faulty communication or a difference in knowledge of the situation. It’s to his brilliance that he understands this one structure of plot well enough to craft from it intricate narratives, heart-wrenching drama, and hilarity.

Sometimes all in the same episode, when he’s at his best.

“The Pilot” isn’t nearly so complex or multilayered. But it’s intriguing for the insight this episode’s particular story gives into the nature of language and communication itself.

Let’s look at this situation in detail, understanding that there are going to be massive

SPOILERS

involved. We have a fairly ordinary situation. Working-class hipster girl meets cute blonde with confidence issues. Implied to be pretty intense depression, judging from the way Heather seems so tired of life.

Maybe this is just because of my own attitude to stories and fiction that
I love, but I'm not that invested as a viewer in the season arc about
the secret vault under the university where the Doctor's been camped
out like Chronotis for who-knows-how-long. I know we'll find out
later on in the season – probably sooner than later if the cracks back
in 2010 are any sign. I want to see what kinds of stories Bill's
character shapes.

When the liquid spaceship drive activated and read Heather’s thoughts, it read was what most dominant – I just want to get away from here, from everything. That impulse to flee from where she was, was the energy of an engine. Merging with the liquid ship, Heather’s drive to leave became the ship’s own pilot function.

In its purest sense, all semantic content is lost in communication from one medium to another. When I say something, I think of it in a particular way, peculiar to my own perspective.

Now, because humans are social creatures, we learn to think through communication and shared action. So our meanings are all similar enough from building them together all the time. Yet miscommunication is still possible. We’re all individual enough to be uniquely different from each other.

In a farce, there’s one such difference that makes all the difference in the process of the whole story. This episode – perhaps I should call it “The Girl With the Star in Her Eye,” whose tragedy is its true centre – is based on a miscommunication across a huge distance.

Humans think in terms of our personalities and interests. We’re subjects for ourselves, understanding our desires as the constituents of our personalities. So when we think and speak, we think in terms of wants and achievements.

Niklas Luhmann is the theorist who first understood how idiosyncratic
our meanings and thoughts really could be. He was a little too
pessimistic though, actually saying that communication as we
understood it is impossible. He thought so abstractly about systems
and environments that they were literally lines on diagrams. We
don't communicate our meanings like computers, by sending
packets across media. We communicate through affects, literally
prodding each other to respond in a way that's reasonably close to
what we want someone to do.

The liquid ship doesn’t think in this way at all. It has no personality – an artificial intelligence, it thinks only in terms of purpose. That purpose is to repair itself and fly. Thoughts that constitute purposes aren’t wants or achievements. They’re protocols, strategies for action.

So when the liquid ship hears Heather’s profound desire to leave her life, it understands a protocol to pilot itself from place to place. The liquid ship absorbs Heather and remakes her – she's no longer entirely human – her desires and egos are now also mechanical protocols for the functioning of a spaceship.

Just before absorption, one other desire at the forefront of her thoughts – her erotic desire to go with Bill. That’s why, when she becomes part of the ship, Heather essentially stalks Bill throughout the universe. Her desire has been turned into a protocol.

That’s why Bill is able to send Heather-ship on her way so easily. All she does is tell her goodbye. A spaceship – unlike far too many humans – is capable of taking no for an answer. Halt function.
• • •
You can even understand Moffat’s own reputation among Doctor Who fandom today as a farce.

Sci-fi fandom today is riddled with poisonous gender politics. Socially awkward men – radicalized into rabid misogyny in their 4Chan families – have lashed out in resentful rage at women who share their interests.

I will not make a joke about how much Nardole looks like a stereotypical
4Chan shitbag. I will not make a joke about how much Nardole looks
like a stereotypical 4Chan shitbag. I will not make a joke about how much
Nardole looks like a stereotypical 4Chan shitbag. I will not make a . . .

Smart or dorky women who like sci-fi are educated in progressive gender politics better now than ever, whether through school or through support communities after dealing with attacks from radical misogynists.

Politically progressive fans mean well. I can’t think of a nicer direction for society than becoming more equal, fair, and free regarding all kinds of gender power imbalances.

I don’t blame anyone for being quick to anger, given what women have to deal with from intentionally aggressive misogynist pricks. But well-meaning people get caught in the crossfire if they’re out of touch with the communities most on the progressive vanguard.

Steven Moffat was one of the people caught in that crossfire, and he came out looking like Sonny Corleone.

In real life, when farcical misunderstandings happen, the results are terrible and rarely funny at all.

When you're a creative producer Doctor Who, you do it best when you bring a singular creative vision to the show. That’s why we remember Verity Lambert, Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks, Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes, Douglas Adams, Andrew Cartmel, Russell T Davies, and Steven Moffat as the most remarkable.

Poor girl really does look like the monster from The Ring, though.
I'm actually surprised Phil Sandifer didn't mention this in his review.

Having a clear aesthetic vision for Doctor Who doesn’t always mean you’re the best-quality producer. Douglas Adams and Graham Williams’ years on the show were marked by consistent mediocrity, as it was yet impossible to find BBC writers able to match Adams’ skill and talent. The Letts-Dicks-Pertwee era produced some amazing train wrecks.

But they all progressed Doctor Who by adding to the cornucopia of what it could be, the styles and personalities it enfolded in its box. Adventure, camp, existential body horror, meta-fictional parody, punk, melodrama, farce.

Better a flawed but vibrant vision than violent nihilism, reactionary racism, shoving fandom’s head up its arse, or simply not caring about the show you work on.

As much as this was a near-perfectly executed piece of television, it’s mostly old hat. Steven Moffat has been doing this for eight years. Not only is he falling back on his old standard plot scaffold, he’s nicking transformed-girl imagery from The Ring.

I love Moffat’s work. I think he’s one of the best writers Doctor Who has ever had, and I think his vision was unique and fertile, opening up so many more spaces for what Doctor Who could do.

But it will have been eight years. Time to regenerate. What’s next?

They Aren’t the Villains This Time, Doctor Who: In the Forest of the Night, Reviews, 26/10/2014

It took me a while to get around to seeing it this time, but In the Forest of the Night was well worth the wait. It was a remarkable Doctor Who story, not just because it finally had a child cast written by someone who actually knows how to write children properly. Myself, I’m a pretty big egomaniac when it comes to my own writing talents, but one task that I definitely have no idea how to do is write a child well. 

Danny Pink does a proper job of thinking of the children.

I know how to write a child badly. One way is to make them an idiot. Another is to make them so precocious that you want to smash their favourite toy just to laugh while they cry. Children don’t have quite the same singularity as adults because they haven’t yet learned how to speak with subtext yet. I think this is why real-life adolescents are especially insufferable; they’ve started incorporating multiple meanings into their speech, but are still largely terrible at it, so I cringe at their poor performance at covering up how horrible they are.

Children, on the other hand, have a special way of bullshitting that’s almost an anti-cover-up, as in a brief little comedy flashback when Danny and Clara discuss how remarkable it is that their students are not being twats in this very strange situation of a forest that’s grown up in the middle of London overnight. When Danny draws a triangle on a whiteboard, indicates an angle with an X and asks Ruby (appropriately cast as a ginger), she tells him that it’s right there at the top of the triangle on the board.

“But what’s its value, Ruby?” asks Mr. Pink.

“Why are you always asking me, sir?” pleads Ruby.

Frank Cottrell Boyce clearly knows how to write children, and I think he should be the go-to writer whenever Doctor Who needs any character under age 12. He’s written both the novel and the screenplay of Millions, as well as three sequels to the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang children’s novel that have actually been artistically successful. It’s a rare feat. 

But aside from his ability to craft multiple child characters in a single story who are not only non-obnoxious but also genuinely interesting, Boyce has made a wonderfully hopeful ecological fable in Doctor Who, which,

SPOILERS

aside, is both a fantastically insightful tale as well as being fantastically naive. I’m on something of a home field here, as I wrote an entire doctoral thesis (under consideration for formal publication) on ecological philosophy. I describe it this way, and not as environmental ethics, because the scope of my Ecophilosophy manuscript is actually broad enough to constitute a complete philosophical perspective on how human society can adapt ecological principles to its structure and daily habits. 

In academic philosophy, writing on the environment means writing environmental moral philosophy, applying the existing moral theories of the philosophical tradition to questions of how to deal with human industry and environmental protection. There are moral principles in my Ecophilosophy manuscript, but the main thrust is adapting principles from the ecological and biological sciences (following the lead of several writers who had done so already) into the framework of the philosophical tradition to build a framework of human nature and self-conception that would result in ecologically sustainable habits on a personal and civilizational scale. 

Another theme I like this season is how frequently the
Doctor has been interacting with children, foregrounding
his importance as a mythical children's hero, even in a
season whose stories have a much more adult sensibility
thanks to their horror content.

In the Forest of the Night is about a forest that appears worldwide overnight, and the narrative follows the Doctor, Clara, Danny, a very special child named Maebh, and the rest of the gifted class from Coal Hill School figuring out what precisely is going on. Eventually, they’re able to figure out that the voices Maebh hears isn’t genuinely a sign of mental abnormality, but a burgeoning telepathic ability.*

* Some of the comments at Phil Sandifer’s review of this episode get into the controversy that the story seems to actively discourage children with mental illnesses from taking their medication. I don’t know what it’s like in Britain, but it’s common in North America to give heavy sedatives to two-year-olds to control hyperactivity. The last couple of generations of children are, if anything, over-medicated to the point of worn-out teachers, overbooked doctors, and overworked parents making them drug addicts before the start of puberty. Doctor Who is a modern myth for our society, through which we deal with major social questions through allegory. This was largely an ecological story, but we can have a behavioural-pharmacological theme running under it as well (if any show can have two allegories running under it, it’s one where the lead has two hearts ;) ). I had behavioural difficulties of my own as a child, particularly a short temper that would lash out whenever I felt afraid, and being very easily frightened that other people were going to hurt me. My mother had the good sense to avoid following the orders of doctors whose first instinct was to reach for their prescription pad before even meeting me. My problems were better solved with cognitive behavioural therapy to improve my consciousness of my own desires, urges, and thought processes. That, however, took the time and effort of a caring and sensitive child psychiatrist, which is too often too much for anyone to commit to.

This telepathic ability is that Maebh can communicate with trees. In the mythical context in which the imagery of the story places us, this is the ability to communicate with the world of faerie. But in the more scientific context in which I understand our mythical narratives, she can literally communicate with trees. 

After all, Doctor Who has always been about awakening
children to the wonders of the strange, so that we never
rest content with a world that feels familiar to us. If we're
never afraid of what's different, we'll be open to
understanding the alien, an epistemic issue on which
the future of our species could very well depend, and . . .
Wait, did I get the wrong picture again? Well, at least
this mistake was easier to make.

Our era’s ecological crisis is, in a fashion, a failure to communicate, or rather a failure to understand the ubiquity of communication. If I can be extremely quick in this argument, one of the ideas I dealt with in my Ecophilosophy manuscript was an underlying principle of systems theory. The mathematical models of systems theory are excellent at describing ecological relationships, because ecological processes are the interactions of multiple overlapping feedback loops at a variety of scales, all affecting each other in unique ways. 

However, the only things that can move back and forth between bodies in systems theoretical models are affects, and the influential philosopher of systems theory, Niklas Luhmann, therefore concluded that there is no true communication among bodies. This is because affects can have no content, only form, that form being a pattern of disruption across various media.**

** I should give props to a wonderful essay by Carey Wolfe for explaining this notion quite clearly, and connecting it with core themes of nihilistic post-modernism that are essential to the early work of Jacques Derrida. I disagree with it completely in the larger sense, but this only helped me solidify my own interpretation of the general post-modern paradigm, as a split between the hopeless nihilism of Derrida and the joyful perspective of Gilles Deleuze.

However, as anyone familiar with information theory or the most profound ideas in contemporary philosophy of language can tell you, form IS content. To communicate is to send a particular pattern of fluctuations across some medium, and have it transition to another medium while keeping the pattern intact. Thought or language is the recognition and interpretation of such patterns. A given pattern doesn’t have content or not in itself alone; it has content if an interpreter of that pattern can make sense of it. So content emerges from the relation of interpreters and media. 

The core lesson of In the Forest of the Night is that we
shouldn't run from what's strange and frightening (no
matter how central running is to Doctor Who), because
listening to what is beyond our knowledge and learning to
understand it could save our lives.

The core human mistake we’ve made that got us into this ecological crisis is that too many of us only know how to understand human language, and every other kind of pattern transmission among bodies, we take to be a mere affect. The Doctor begins to solve the problem of In the Forest of the Night when he realizes that Maebh can understand the patterns transmitted among plants. In the scene in the glowing glen, the Doctor is able to translate the plants’ patterns into human speech.

If only it were that easy to understand the lives of all the other organisms and ecosystems on our planet, we’d live in a much more harmonious, clean, and just world. 

Humanity is lucky In the Forest of the Night, because this time, the trees are here to save our ecosystems from dangerous solar activity. The sun brings life, because it supplies Earth with the energy to produce metabolisms and ecosystems, but it brings death because it’s also an enormous ball of nuclear fusion explosions. The trees are giving us a chance not to destroy our own world with our stupid, short-sighted thinking that can't understand ecological relationships, as when David Cameron orders all the trees burned down instead of trying to understand what happened.

And we forget because we humans are stupid, and so few of us know how to communicate with anything but what’s already just like us. It’s hard enough to get people to learn a second human language, let alone speak with trees. Communication is simply finding new ways to understand all the transmissions that surround us all the time. 

As the Doctor says, if we remembered that, there would be no war and no injustice. But we forget to probe what we can do, and instead rest stupidly content with what we already know, as if that’s all that’s worth knowing.

In the Forest of the Night. A classic.